Want to win a grassroots campaign? Use Drupal!

Last Sunday was a very turbulent day for the city of Antwerp, home of the Krimson office and some of the people of our krew. In a referendum, the people from Antwerp could decide pro or contra a huge viaduct (The "Lange Wapper").

Until last year, opposition against the multi-billion works (latest estimation: 2.5 billion euro) was rather limited, until organization Ademloos ('Breathless') started a big grassroots campaign.

Ademloos had a very limited budget. Well, no budget actually, but a lot of enthusiasm and a very professional and dedicated staff.
On the contrary: BAM NV, the government funded company that is organizing the works has a marketing budget of over 1 million euro.

In order to inform the public about the campaign, and to tackle the information spread by BAM NV, Ademloos needed an online platform.

Goals:

• react fast on evolving news
• low barrier for interaction
• heavy use of multimedia: videos, music, pictures
• easy connection to social sites
• easy to add the hard data: downloadable pdf's, links to other sites, ...
• easy to add extra functionality

The people at Ademloos know their history, so they chose the Open Source CMS and framework Drupal to build an online platform for their campaign. Since its early days, Drupal has been an important player in the battle for the control of information. The campaign for Howard Dean in 2004, using DeanSpace, a community based CMS built on Drupal, was the real start of the success of Drupal.
Today sites like NowPublic (or Indymedia.be - the belgian independent media site, built by our krew member Bruno) play an important role in the distribution of information.

So what happended with the Ademloos-website ?

• over 200 campaign videos were added to the site - lot of them made by famous people from Antwerp
• over 130 cartoons are posted in the site
• the site evolved constantly during the campaign: new functionality was added every other week, sometimes even overnight.
• user generated content was added to the site constantly
• the website is considered as the best source of campaign material for hundreds of campaigners

Krimson was contacted to provide technical advice, help building the website, and keeping an eye on it during the campaign.

Although not everyone at Krimson is happy with the outcome of the referendum, we are all happy that Drupal played such an important role in this campaign.

Another win for Drupal!

About us:
Krimson is a specialized Drupal company. We build websites for media companies, non-profit organizations, and we do specialized Drupal development. Our team of 9 people is involved in the international and local Drupal community.

Picture courtesy of Joe van Froe Froe - Poesjenellen